Brugia Malayi - Clark Science Center - Smith College

Electricity Consumption Monitoring System
Zhouchangwan Yu, Rumbidzai Vushe and Yamin Tun
One of the big challenges of maintaining the sustainability of our campus is to control the electricity usage and save energy in a
collective way. This electricity-monitoring device is developed to make the electricity usage measurements of campus buildings and
houses accessible to the people in the building and alert them if the electricity consumed exceeds the usual needs.
An Arduino board, an open-source microcontroller, is programmed using a wiring language named Arduino. The circuit
is mainly built of an Arduino board, an Ethernet shield and cable, and a prototyping shield stacked on top of each other. Two
RGB LEDs (tri-colored LEDs) are connected through a light pipe. The Arduino program is designated to extract the real-time
electricity usage data from the Autologic html page via Ethernet, to display the data on a LCD screen and to change the colors of
LEDs depending on the electricity use in the building. The circuit is powered by a 9V battery and enclosed in a white acrylic box.
The device displays the current electricity consumed and other related information such as the accumulated electricity
consumed and the average electricity consumed for today. The device glows lights in three colors (green, yellow, red) depending
on the current power used in the building. For the general user, we included the colored LEDs to give a sense of whether the
electricity use is more than the average need of the building in three colors. According to the feedback, the users can have a better
sense of how much electricity they are consuming and take further actions to reserve energy and costs.
Since the general users will rely mostly on the colors as the feedback, it is very important to determine the reasonable
thresholds for the electricity usage levels. In order to do that, we are in the progress of studying the electricity usage data of each
individual house and building in different periods of the past years. We will continue this project as a Special Studies project during
the academic year. (Supported by the National Grid and the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Smith College)
Advisor: Judith Cardell
2012
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